The Democratic political establishment is stiff and wobbly, its aging legs ache and it doesn’t know what to do with Alexandria the Great.
Will they bend the knee? Will they dare to oppose her and the movement she represents?
Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is mocking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the same smug, simpering grin they once gave Donald Trump before he was elected president, just to poke them in the raw.
Establishment Democrats, on the other hand, get her. She’s the face of a vigorous far-left movement that’s pushing them further and further left. And there’s nothing they can fucking do about it.
They are a little wary of her now that she has defeated 10-term incumbent Rep. Joseph Crowley of New York, who was on track for a major leadership role until she routed him in the Democratic primary a month ago.
She’s a rock star. She looks good on TV. She’s juvenile and she’s invigorating juvenile voters who have resented the constant baiting by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party that rigged the last presidential primary against Sanders, helping to bring in Trump.
She is Latina.
She is a socialist.
And not some prosperous socialist from Champagne, but a real one, a Bernie Sanders organizer, albeit with a tougher edge than the senior Bernie. He gave up instead of pushing Hillary away. She doesn’t give up. She hustle.
Alexandria is a country with far-left views, much further to the left than the apparatchiks of the gigantic government elite of the Democratic Party.
Democrats are flaunting it and hoping to utilize it. But there’s a tremor in their voices, fearing that Alexandria the Great — like that little boy in that senior Twilight Zone episode — might just wish they’d go to the cornfield.
“I have three kids, two of them are daughters,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez recently told liberal radio host Bill Press. “One just graduated from college, one is in college, and they were both texting me about how excited they were about Alexandria because she really — she represents the future of our party.”
What is the future of the Democratic Party?
She had a disastrous coming out on the PBS reboot of “Firing Line,” clumsily answering uncomplicated questions about the economy: “Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs.” And while she has proven to have a leftist hatred of Israel, when pressed, she said she was “not an expert on the geopolitics of that.”
Liam Warner of The National Review wrote, “Most of the time, Ocasio-Cortez opened her mouth only to switch legs.”
It was a great line. But it will improve. Its message is not for Republicans, but for the Democratic Party:
Abolish ICE and effectively end border enforcement; enact a national minimum wage of $15 an hour; promise “free” healthcare for all and “free” college tuition; and dump some hate on Israel.
You may argue that such political goals are impossible, unprofitable, perhaps even somewhat idiotic and unsafe. But that is irrelevant.
This is a song. Candidates who refuse to sing this song risk finding themselves, as Lenin would say, “on the wrong side of history.”
For Democrats, a gigantic push to the left — especially a call for what is essentially an open border — may play well on America’s two leftist coasts. But it won’t assist seduce the working class in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which abandoned the Democrats for Trump in 2016.
And that could assist Trump in 2020 by ensuring that the Democrats nominate some lunatic.
Moderate-left Democrats recently gathered in Ohio at the Third Way conference to argue that progressive Bernie Sanders is not the way to go. But potential Democratic primary candidates have stayed away. They don’t want to be embarrassed.
Elsewhere, New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who loved the Clintons before the #MeToo movement overwhelmed her support for Bill, now wants to abolish ICE if Democrats take over Congress in the 2018 midterm elections.
“So when we flip the House and flip the Senate, I think the first thing we should do is take care of the children who have been separated from their families at the border,” she said. “I think we should get rid of ICE.”
The revolution has not been televised so far. The US news media, which is overwhelmingly liberal but eagerly beholden to the establishment class, has spent most of its time since November 2016 criticizing Trump.
The shrieks from the Democratic Media Complex assist bind the Democratic tribes against their common red-haired enemy. But all that insanely emotional virtue signaling has obscured something.
It’s the left’s justified anger at the way they were treated in 2016, when Democrats isolated themselves from democracy by rigging the primaries against Sanders, leveraging superdelegates to benefit Clinton, and taking all the cash off Wall Street.
Sanders voters, many of whom are juvenile, passionate, and idealistic, view the Democratic establishment much the same way that juvenile libertarians and conservatives viewed the Republican establishment in the last political cycle:
Equally corrupt, cynically selfish and obstructive.
Those who understand politics know that Trump was a symptom, not a cause.
It is similar with Alexandria the Great.
At their peril, Republicans laugh at it without understanding. Democrats understand, but can’t assist but sway like corkscrews in the wind.
